ate
it as known in the twelfth century. Neither is it included in the
ransom-beasts of Cailte's collection. Yet a native Irish name for the
bear--Mathghambain--occurs in an old glossary[60] in the Library of
Trinity College, Dublin; and the late Wm. Thomson says that a tradition
is current of its having once been an Irish animal; and it is associated
with the wolf as a native beast in the stories handed down from
generation to generation to the present time.

The wolf, however, survived in both islands to a much later era. In the
days of the Heptarchy it was a terrible pest; King Edgar commuted the
punishment of certain offences into a requisition for a fixed number of
wolves' tongues; and he converted a heavy tax on one of the Welsh
princes into an annual tribute of three hundred wolves' heads. These
laws continued to the time of Edward I., when the increasing scarcity of
the animal doubtless caused them to fall into disuse. Mr Topham, in his
Notes to Somerville's "Chase," says, that it was in the wolds of
Yorkshire that a price was last set on a wolf's head. The last record of
their occurring in formidable numbers in England is in 1281; but for
three centuries after this, the mountains and forests of Scotland
harboured them; for Hollinshed reports that in 1577 the wolves were very
troublesome to the flocks of that country. Nor were they entirely
destroyed out of this island till about a century afterwards, when the
last wolf fell in Lochaber, by the hand of Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel.
In Ireland the last wolf was slain in 1710.

Thus here we are able to lay our finger on the exact dates when a large
and rapacious species of animal actually became extinct so far as the
British Isles are concerned. And if the species had been confined in its
geographical limits, as many other species of animals are, to one group
of islands, we should know the precise date of its absolute extinction.

The Beaver was once an inhabitant of British rivers. Its remains are
found in Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Yorkshire, and elsewhere, associated
with the other Mammalia of the fresh-water deposits and caves, but not
in any abundance. No record of its actual existence, however, in these
counties exists, nor anywhere else but in Wales and Scotland, whose
mountain streams and rugged ravines afforded it shelter till after the
Norman Conquest. It was very rare even then, and for a hundred years
before; for the laws of Howel Dda, the Welsh king,